The Open Door: Christina Pugh and Rachel Webster

The Poetry Foundation inaugurates its MFA reading series, The Open Door. The new series highlights the teacher-student dynamic, presents exciting work from Chicago’s new and emerging poets, and celebrates the area’s outstanding writing programs. Each hour-long reading will feature two Chicagoland college and graduate writing program instructors and two of their current or recent students.

Christina Pugh's third book of poems is Grains of the Voice (Northwestern University Press, 2013). She is an associate professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and consulting editor for Poetry.

Rachel Jamison Webster is an artist-in-residence at Northwestern University and author of September (Tri-Quarterly Books, 2013) and The Blue Grotto (Dancing Girl Press, 2009). Her poems and essays have appeared in many anthologies and journals, including Blackbird, Narrative, The Paris Review, Poetry and The Southern Review. Webster edits universeofpoetry.org and recently created a radio series for Chicago Public Radio called “The Gift.” For several years, she worked with First Lady Maggie Daley to create after-school literary arts programs for teens, co-editing two anthologies of writing by young Chicagoans, Alchemy (2001) and Paper Atrium (2005).

Matthew Reed Corey lives in Chicago. He recently completed a PhD in creative writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he won the AWP Intro Journals Project Prize and the Paul Carroll Award in Creative Writing. His poems have appeared in Artifice Magazine, Crazyhorse, DIAGRAM, Massachusetts Review and elsewhere.

Peter Tolly is a senior studying poetry in Northwestern University’s creative writing program. His work has been published in the student-run literary magazine Prompt. Interested in the publishing industry and the economy of books, he recently interned at Northwestern University Press and currently works at a used bookstore. He is also exploring medieval forms of verse as an ancient means of evoking contemporary existence for an honors project in creative writing.